We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Well of course they fired him! I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)
– James Damore
No wonder they fired him! Treat people as individuals? The man is literally Hitler. In reality, it’s precisely because the memo was reasonably argued that they freaked out. That is why the left wing media and SJW twitterati put less reasonable words in his mouth that he never wrote.
I am stuck with an Android phone, at least for now, but I am in the process of ditching GMail and Google and will probably move to Protonmail and Bing, unless someone has better suggestions.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
With an Android phone you are always going to be a bit stuck, but DuckDuckGo is a reasonable answer to Google for searching rather than Bing (which frankly sucks balls)
You could also think about moving to the Brave browser which is a lot more protective of your personal information than Google and the like and actively limits the monetization of your information.
Ultimately, the best way to punish Google for this shitty behaviour is through their income stream.
https://duckduckgo.com/
https://brave.com/
DuckDuckGo is great but it is just a privacy screen over Google, so underlying problems with how Google works remains 😆
I use Runbox, a Norwegian-based email provider, it costs about USD 35 pa, and annoyingly is hydro-powered but apart from bleating about that ‘Green’ credential, they’ve had one security issue in about 4 years that I am aware of, which led to a short server shut-down. Runbox say Norwegian privacy laws and their controls are strict, not sure what they are but it makes for a provider albeit in the EEA, outside the EU and the US.
If you like Bing, then you should probably stay with the Micro$oft theme and use outlook.com for email. I prefer the duckduckgo.com search engine.
Most of Google’s profits come from advertising revenue. Most of their advertising is delivered directly through Google Search.
Switch to Bing.com. I’ve been using it for some time, and once I got used to it, it’s just as effective as Google.
(It’s ironic that I’m now recommending the use of a Microsoft product in order to defeat the behemoth monopoly, but life changes quickly these days.)
Agreed, but what you correctly describe as a privacy screen also acts as a demonetising screen, since they can’t get the same value out of of DuckDuckGo faced searches as they can from direct Google searches.
Not ideal I admit, but if enough people make small steps away from Google then in aggregate that is a mighty big change.
I am also doing a very trivial piece of coding on my mens forum to replace all youtube links with hooktube links. Although our traffic is lighter than Samizdata, it is a relatively trivial thing to do.
https://hooktube.com
Every little helps!
Ken, the DuckDuckGo ‘search engine’ sits on top of Google. You get an untracked Google search.
One question for DDG users:
DDG piggybacks on the Google search engine, but strips out the ads and replaces them with its own ads from Yahoo syndication.
Does the use of DDG result in any ad revenue for Google? Or does DDG somehow get the use of the Google platform for free?
An improvement, I agree, because nothing changes behaviour quite attacking someone’s bottom line. Problem is, I no longer trust Google to not ideologically tilt certain search results, so whilst I am not exactly a fan of MS either, Google is the primary problem on oh so many levels now. I have switched to Bing by default, now to work on shifting my email.
Damore : I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
This is a standard, and no doubt heartfelt, disclaimer of the type one always sees from members of the dark side in the sex / race / IQ etc wars (the Pinkers, Murrays and so on.) It’s a nice comfort blanket, but it serves no protective function against the SJWs and has the further disadvantage of being obviously wrong.
The correct, but hardly comforting, thing to say is that if you have two populations – Xs and Ys – and the mean “thingynessness” score of Xs is 110 (with a standard deviation of 15) while the mean “thingynessness” score of Ys is 90 (with a standard deviation of 15) there are several things you can validly say about a random individual Y who may walk into the room, of whom you know nothing other than that it is a Y. You cannot, of course, say anything definitive about that individual Y’s own “thingynessness” score unless you test that indiviidual directly. But you can say lots of statistical things about how likely it is that that particular Y has a “thingynessness” score of over 80, over 90, over 100 etc. Or how likely that that person is to be the thingynessnessest person to walk into the room in the next hour. The fact that you only know statistical things certainly doesn’t mean that you know nothing. After all if you select employees on the basis of college degrees, job interviews, IQ scores and whether their shirts are tucked in you still only have clues as to how a particular recruit will work out in practice, based on your previous experience of how previous applicants with comparable traits got on.
It is obviously true that once you have replaced statistical predictions about an individual based on its group with individual measurement, you know a lot more about that individual than you did before. But you didn’t know nothing before. This is what prejudices and stereotypes are for. We use them to predict the behaviour of dogs, lampposts, knives, motor cars, spiders, as well as humans. Life is much too short to test each individual, individually. The more important any individual dog, lamppost, knife, motor car, spider or human becomes in our lives, the greater the benefits of the individual test, relative to the cost.
Damore was fired for spreading “harmful” gender stereotypes. That’s instructive, no ? No one would have thought the harmfulness of the stereotype was even vaguely relevant if he had been stereotyping dogs, lampposts, knives, motor cars or spiders. All anyone would have wanted to know was whether the sterotype was (statistically) accurate.
“DuckDuckGo is great but it is just a privacy screen over Google”
Not entirely. It aggregates results from several engines. If you use one of its “bang” filters, (“!i” to search images, for example), it’ll often take you straight to Google, but the general search is wider. I may be too optimistic here, but I suspect that this also means it provides some defence should Google start manipulating their results (assuming they don’t already).
“It’s ironic that I’m now recommending the use of a Microsoft product in order to defeat the behemoth monopoly, but life changes quickly these days.”
Indeed. One reason I know that DDG isn’t simply a Google proxy is that I had reservations about its use of Bing. 🙂
If I started boycotting companies which treat their employees with contempt I’d end up living in a mud hut and starving to death.
Selling your labour to a company always means you have to play by its rules.
Being a customer means you can withhold your business if you find the rules that employees have to play by sufficiently objectionable. You won’t be able to fine tune every company to your liking, but every once in a while a large enough number of customers can have an impact.
“I am in the process of ditching GMail”
Do what I did years ago & buy yourself a domain with a web mail service. Costs next to nothing & you can have any number of addresses @ whatever.whatever Addresses people can remember. And there’s also real live people at the end of a helpline to sort out problems.
Employees are one thing, but I doubt that few if any of us are employees of Google, at best we’re customers, at worst we’re unwilling products. 😯
One thing is certain though, Google occupies its position at the top of the internet food chain because it was technologically superior to its competitors nearly two decades ago.
They have managed to keep ahead through innovation, acquisitions and being able to monetize the traffic that comes through their various doors, but that does not guarantee them a future. Don’t believe me look at the history of Yahoo! as an example.
I believe what we have witnessed recently is the moment that Google “Jumped the Shark”. How long it takes for that to translate into downward momentum and on to terminal decline is unclear. As with everything on the internet I doubt it will take long.
As Francis Urquhart famously says at the beginning of House of Cards (while holding a framed photo of St. Margaret of Thatcher)
I’d guess that how Google treats their employees is the least of anyone’s concerns.
Google has a near-monopoly on bringing requested information to people across the world. We’ve known for some time that Google has a strong leftist bent, but this episode has made it clear that they are more extremist than imagined.
The issue is, do we want these people to have such power in our society? To many of us, the answer is a resounding No! The most effective course of action, then, is to encourage people to stop buying their product.
I am stuck with an Android phone, at least for now…
The difficulty is that your options are Apple, which is just as bad, or a feature phone, or a Blackberry 10 phone (Android based, but no google crap).
The only other option, as Android is open source, is to root your phone and get rid of all the google crap and/or load a custom ROM.
” but I doubt that few if any of us are employees of Google, at best we’re customers, at worst we’re products. ”
If you’re using the PAID-FOR version of Google, then you’re a customer. If you’re using the free version of Gmail, then you’re the product.
The man is literally Hitler.
Even if you’re paying Google for some service or other, they are still exploiting your activity, so paying for something doesn’t exclude you from being a product at the same time.
Do what I did years ago & buy yourself a domain with a web mail service. Costs next to nothing & you can have any number of addresses @ whatever.whatever Addresses people can remember. And there’s also real live people at the end of a helpline to sort out problems.
This.
You should do this anyway, even one without a web mail service, as any domain management involves mail redirection, so you can keep your email address the same and use any email service you like, switching whenever you prefer, you can even do a “Hillary” and have your own email server for ultimate paranoia.
Nice use of Hooktube Alisa! 😎
The Bloomberg interviewer was trying to box James Dalmore into a corner suggesting that his assertions had no factual basis, that the bullshit put out by Google’s Head of Diversity 😆 was somehow meaningful or that he was an Alt-Right bigot.
In many ways he’s a typical geek (nothing wrong with that), but he seems to be holding up quite well against the media barrage.
No doubt when Google’s stock price starts to tank they will be in contact with him, attempting to stuff his mouth with gold to silence him.
I can’t see any upside for Google in all of this, in fact it seems a lot like a self-manufactured crisis similar to United Airlines beating up passengers from a few months back.
Who also came across as a really good kid, who honestly wanted to contribute something extra to the company at which he worked and which he liked – Hitler indeed. I can understand very well all those disagreeing with him – a legitimate disagreement that the guy repeatedly acknowledged in his manifesto; but the people who went as far as firing him should take a long and good look in the mirror.
Now this was something I was hoping he wouldn’t do – but I haven’t walked in his shoes, so…
BTW JG, FB blocks Hooktube links 😡
Wouldn’t know. I avoid Facebook like the plague.
That’s interesting though. I’ve wondered for a while if Google and Facebook are data sharing on the basis that the combination of their data might be more valuable to data miners than in isolation.
They might just ban it to discourage others from taking similar approaches, for example an anonymised mask on top of Facebook.
One of the best articles on the issue I have read so far, at Bloomberg, H/T, Virginia Postrel.
An interesting note is that James Dalmore has now officially filed a legal complaint against Google with the National Labor Relations Board.
The engineer Google fired over the diversity memo has filed a complaint with federal labor officials
…and Alphabet shares continue to fall…Good!
The Wall Street Journal today has a good “Notable and Quotable” piece on this.
Which is completely lost on most of us as we’re not subscribers and can’t see behind its paywall, however feel free to enlighten us further Laird…
I had the same thoughts on FB etc. JG (I use FB for very specific reasons and purposes). As to the complaint he filed, like I said above: I was hoping he wouldn’t do that.
Jonathan, that’s a great piece indeed – thanks.
I don’t generally agree with stuff like Employment Tribunals as they are all too often used as a stick to beat private businesses who fail or refuse to comply with politically correct government diktats on diversity and the like.
Since they do exist it is perfectly reasonable for James Dalmore to use them against Google and indeed no more than he already said he was going to do (he said he would file a labor board complaint in his New York Times interview, I think).
Insisting that employees have intellectual freedom and then firing an employee for expressing said intellectual freedom when it didn’t align with the companies politically correct views as pretty shitty behaviour.
That makes no sense at all, JG.
Of course it is a very shitty behavior – but that doesn’t mean that one has to resort to governmental violence to punish it. Still, like I said: I haven’t walked in his shoes, so I’m just sitting here and typing away.
Sorry, John Galt. The piece is short enough to post here in its entirety:
Not sure how it works where you are Alisa…not even sure where that is, but if you attempt to seek redress in civil court in the UK without having sought mediation / arbitration or an employment tribunal, you will get short shrift in court.
This may be different in California, but I’ll be surprised if it is.
Civil courts in England and Wales exist as a mechanism of last resort and are pretty intolerant towards those seeking redress who have not exhausted all other avenues first.
Since the government runs the courts and tribunal services, it’s hard to get redress elsewhere unless Google also agrees to independent arbitration.
I wish we lived in a Libertarian society where such things as truly independent courts existed without government interference, but the simple truth is we don’t.
James’ approach at least means the Google will face some justice.
As it is in the USA.
One doesn’t go to civil court seeking a ruling until one has exhausted the mandatory mediation/arbitration steps. Virtually every civil case faces such requirements.
Further, there may be governmental administrative steps one must take prior to approaching the courts. This is especially true in the employment law realm, where one must first make complaint to the EEOC or the NLRB or their local equivalent. Miss that step, and you’ll face summary dismissal in court.
If that step fails to give you satisfaction, or if you receive that agency’s permission at the start to skip that step, you are then allowed to file your lawsuit with the court.
Lee Moore’s comments are correct
We can always depend on the Left to lack self-awareness. By firing him they merely prove his point correct, and necessary make themselves villains in the process. Leftist hypocrites always shriek for diversity but demand conformity. One thing the crypto-religion of leftism cannot allow is sound reasoning. it gets in the way of their faith-based narrative.
“
I’m pretty sure every leftist position contradicts other leftist positions, and many are self-contradictory.
An aluminum backed mirror perhaps, but not a silver-backed mirror. Silver doesn’t reflect evil.
Richard (Epstein) commented on the legalities and ethicalities *g* in his podcast “The Libertarian” today. Richard sees the problem the firing creates for libertarians. Recommended.
http://www.hoover.org/research/libertarian-google-controversy
When Orwell used the Newspeak term “Doublethink” in “1984”, it was not a unique creation never before existing in nature, but simply an accurate reflection of the cognitive dissonance that was widespread within the Marxist dialectic and which even Lenin and Stalin acknowledged with studied nonchalance.
When the Head of Diversity (presumably resident in Room 101 of Google’s headquarters) justified firing
Jeffrey DahmerJames Damore she makes it clear to all that his crime was not being a misogynist (although she thinks he is) or being a racist (although she thinks he is), no. His crime was “spreading uncomfortable truths“.Jeffrey DahmerJames Damore did this because Google has an enlightened policy of rigorous intellectual freedom of thought…unless you have the wrong thoughts, obviously. He should have known this and kept his damn mouth shut, but he didn’t. So clearly he’s an idiot and since Google doesn’t hire idiots, only the best and the brightest then he clearly lied on his CV to get the job.So there you go.
Bloody heretic. Clearly hanging is too good for him.
What do you mean “Eppur si muove?“
Thanks for that Julie, that was quite interesting.
It does highlight differences between USA and European employment law which many of us are only vaguely aware of (since “at will” hire-and-fire is pretty much an alien concept to most Europeans), but also that it is unlikely that he will have any legal remedy through the NLRB and is just going through the necessary prerequisites for a civil trial.
The point that he’s been subject to very severe an completely unjustified defamation by Google though is interesting. I think I can hear their chequebook opening as we speak… 😆
Apropos of nothing 😛 I notice that Google’s CEO has cut short his vacation to deal with this self-manufactured crisis. I hope he’s brought a pen… 😀
It seems as though, for all of their progressive, innovative and environmentally friendly technology, Google have failed to understand the meaning of Hubris, the world’s only genuinely renewable resource*. 😛
* – With apologies to P.J. O’Rourke.
As I have said before – it is the hypocrisy of the these internet managers (and the rest of the “creative industries”) that is so sickening.
They go on-and-on about how they love “freedom” and “open exchange of ideas” (and-so-on) and the moment that someone says something they do not agree with (something that offends their Frankfurt School of Marxism egalitarian “SJW” belief system) they try to destroy them.
The corporate managers (especially in the “creative industries” of the “knowledge economy”) are scum – total and absolute scum. And the joke is that the if the Marxists (whose egalitarian doctrines they push) ever fully take over – then the internet zillionaries will find themselves dragged from their luxury homes, straight to Death Camps.
It is rather hard to have any sympathy.
Rich people pushing egalitarianism (in the name of “Diversity”) are turkeys voting for Christmas (or Thanksgiving in the United States) – they are pushing the looting (and the murder) of themselves and their families.
It is not as if the real left has made any secret of what it thinks of “Google” and the rest – the demonstrators in San Francisco (and so on) have made their feelings quite clear for many years.
They want you dead, you stupid swine, the left (the real left) want you dead – they want you dead because you are rich. And you spend all your time trying to make friends with them (newsflash – this is not possible) by pushing the university Frankfurt School of Marxism “Diversity” doctrine.
You can appoint as many black-female-disabled-lesbians-with-hispanic-names as you like – and it will make no difference (none) – the left will still want you dead. They want you dead because you are rich.
They (the big people at Google and Twitter and Facebook and ….) will not listen – they will continue to ignore all warnings, they will continue to push the Marxist egalitarian “Diversity” agenda and they will continue to GIVE MONEY to various far left organisations.
And they will suffer the same fate as the Duke or Orleans – the richest man in France who funded the French Revolution and voted for the death of his cousin (the King) and was then murdered by his “friends”.
When contemplating the future of the very rich leftists who control Google, Facebook, Twitter (and so on) one would have to have a heart of stone – not to laugh.
JG, I take your (and Bobby’s) legalistic point. My point though was just this: I’d like to think that if I were to find myself in Damore’s situation, I’d just try to do my best to get on with my life, and let Google try its luck with a new engineer who will be willing to get on with their program. I’d like to think that I’d do that because a., I think that any company should have every right to fire whomever it wishes for whatever reason, and then face the natural consequences of its choices, unless they are clearly violating a specific provision in the employment contract – all independent of any government-made laws and regulations; and b., because the last thing I want to do with my life is to deal with lawyers (as a profession, not as individuals 🙂 )
Exactly.
Alisa (August 11, 2017 at 8:19 am), I believe in the right of a company to fire employees according to its judgement / their contracts, but I also agree with Paul’s remark (August 11, 2017 at 7:13 am) “it is the hypocrisy” – or, as I would say to an SJW, “It’s your hypocrisy, stupid!” If Danmore’s lawyering forces Google to display more of theirs, he may do good in the world. That could be the very way he chooses to “get on with his life”. He certainly has a motive to raise the visibility of the debate to the point where any SJW saying “but he’s a *ist” will likely be sharing the room with someone who knows better.
Of course it’s the hypocrisy, Niall – but hypocrisy is not illegal and this is how it should remain. As to the rest of your comment, I take the opposite (i.e. pessimistic) view. Time will tell, though.
@Perry, I’m doing the same, but opted for FastMail instead of ProtonMail after a bit of comparison searching “FastMail vs ProtonMail”. ProtonMail sounded good as well though, just personal preference really.
Some other options and a good chart here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers
I also echo the advice about buying your own domain name and making that your email address. The domain registrar I just used (iwantmyname.com – a Kiwi company) has an easy dashboard option to connect your new name to FastMail, along with a lot of other services like blogs, hosting, etc. Offers WHOIS privacy by default as well.
Then you are a better person than I am Alisa (and James Damore as well apparently), since if I was in his position and had been screwed over and defamed my anger would be legendary, as would my desire for revenge. Google’s hypocritical actions started this and their defamation after the CEO had him fired for a cause which was blatantly untrue rubbed salt in the wounds and was intentionally defamatory.
Sure, a multi-million dollar settlement cheque from Google might ease my pain. Why not?
I seriously doubt that; I do tend to think that I’m a wiser person, because I’m very pessimistic about Damore’s chances of making a fortune off Google through litigation, or about punishing Google by bad publicity through the same. (If I thought that he has a good chance of achieving either of these aims, I’d say ‘more power to him’). But of course I could be very wrong, plus, like I said: I’m not in his actual situation, and as such mine is just a barely-informed opinion.
You might be right Alisa, but then again, as the Zen Master says “We’ll See“.
Charlie Wilson’s War – The Zen Master and the Little Boy (via Hooktube)
😀
Actually I do hope to be proven wrong.
DuckDuckGo isn’t a privacy screen over Google. In fact, according to a profile I found, it doesn’t use Google at all (unless you tell it to), rather it uses “search results syndicated from third parties like Bing and Yandex but, crucially, they’re filtered and reorganized to reduce spam”.
I think Startpage was more like a privacy screen over Google.
I tried to switch to Startpage and DuckDuckGo last year, but unfortunately I found they weren’t very good. I might try again.
Profile article:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3026698/inside-duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor
Alisa: What’s good for the goose is good for the Google. This is the world SJW’s have made. They just don’t like the idea of being forced to obey their own rules, fairly and without hypocrisy or double standards. Because those are the only standards they have.
I reckon many of those who wanted him fired would have got him killed of they could have got away with it. Per the Daily Mail his memo included this:
Mr Ed: I would have thought that was normal and to be expected with SJWs…
A short article on “escaping the Goolag”.
mail.com is good if you don’t want to go to the lengths of getting your own domain, or if you just like webmail.
I’ve moved to Firefox and Duckduckgo, although I’m aware they too have problems. Right now, I’m just trying to help make the numbers show up for Goolag… errr… Google.
Mike Marsh (August 13, 2017 at 10:54 pm), I left Firefox when Brendan Eich was fired. We’d be in a poor way if the only way to reprove one SJW company was to flatter another. 🙂
(I have Brave, Safari and IE on my various machines. I use DuckDuckGo and Bing for searches.)
Recommendation for e-mail:
Fastmail.com
It’s a paid service, and is pretty good about privacy and security.